


Ostalgie/Miss Me? (The Six Thatchers)

by PlaidAdder



Series: Sherlock Meta [10]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s04e01 The Six Thatchers, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-04
Updated: 2017-03-04
Packaged: 2018-09-28 08:25:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10081385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: In other words, "The Six Thatchers" tells us in many many ways that Sherlock’s answer to “Did you miss me?” is “Oh my God, ALL DAY EVERY DAY.”





	

  * One thing I learned from watching The X-Files is that when something makes no goddamn sense when you read it literally, you can sometimes get it to make sense if you read it figuratively. Obviously there’s a big difference between TAB and TST; but Gatiss wrote both, and I believe there’s some overlap in terms of style and method. For instance: in both TAB and TST, Moriarty’s intrusion into Sherlock’s thoughts is often marked with either an aural or visual effect; in the case of TST, it’s the reflection of blue water moving. Other less specific but still dreamlike echoes include the even-more-than-usually-disorienting transitions (the smashing-the-frame effect, the disappearance into the shadow of the swimming shark) and of course things like this shot of the disintegrating plaster cast projected onto Sherlock’s face. One of the differences between a symbol and a metaphor is that a symbol conveys multiple meanings simultaneously; and this image conveys, among other things: 1) Sherlock as fragile and broken/breaking; 2) Sherlock as petrified/petrifying; 3) Sherlock as chimera (half human, half facsimile); 4) Sherlock as masked, a la Phantom of the Opera, which further implies 5) Sherlock as monstrous or maybe 6) Sherlock has internalized a monster or 7) Sherlock has worn this one mask for so long that his face has conformed to it.

You all can have fun unpacking that; I want to talk specifically about this as an image of  _ostalgie_. 

Ostalgie is what Craig the hacker explains to the viewer as a way of explaining why some factory in Tbilisi is making busts of Margaret Thatcher. Specifically, I am informed, ostalgie is a word for the feeling former East Germans have for the vanished Communist state in which they once lived. But Thatcher comes into it only because Moffat and Gatiss seem to have broadened it to include nostalgia for the Cold War era itself; and from there we could broaden it further to include “nostalgia for your old enemies,” who one sometimes–after engaging with new enemies–comes to look back on with a certain wistfulness. Given the new breed of political menaces we’re now dealing with, one might look at “The Six Thatchers” itself as an example of Gatiss’s _ostalgie_ for the Thatcher era, when the world was more geopolitically stable, and everyone knew whose side they were on, as opposed to the kind of twenty-first century chaos represented by the rise of AGRA and its last disastrous mission. There’s a difference between _liking_ your enemy and _missing_  them. I’m sure Gatiss hates Thatcher. But one can miss the security that one’s enemy offered, the sense that one knew who one had to fight and how, that the anger s/he evoked was efficacious and empowering. One can miss the old battles, the forces one now knows (though of course one didn’t then) how to defeat. Even at times of relative prosperity–when the pundits begin to say patently insane things like “we’re now living in a post-racial America”–one can miss being able to point at someone like, say, Jesse Helms and say, “In a post-racial America, would this asshole be a Senator?” The enemy is useful as a landmark, as a way of making visible one’s sense that all is not right. And if Thatcher served that purpose of a generation of Britons, Moriarty clearly serves that purpose for Sherlock.

In other words, TST tells us in many many ways that Sherlock’s answer to “Did you miss me?” is “Oh my God, ALL DAY EVERY DAY.” “I’m the target, the target waits,” Sherlock says–because he really wants to be found by the guy who’s targeting him. (Mary, who does NOT want to be found, has a different approach: the target runs the fuck away.)  Moriarty has functioned since S1E1 as an organizing principle for Sherlock, as the center from which all the evil radiates. Without him, there’s just chaos, a jumble of meaningless unrelated actions from which a guiding principle has yet to emerge. Despite the amount of chaos Sherlock tends to generate in his wake, Sherlock–and Holmes before him–cannot really function in a truly chaotic world. Mary’s idea of foiling him by introducing randomness into her plans is a good one; Holmes’s m.o. always relied on people conforming to type, and the people who were capable of defeating him were the ones who didn’t. Sherlock’s deduction riffs only work as long as the balance of probability holds. In a world which is less and less governed by logic, Sherlock will feel himself more and more adrift. 

As mad as Moriarty was, by making himself the epicenter of evil, he organized the web of crime in spite of himself. And throughout TST, Sherlock is consistently thrown off by his assumption that Moriarty will ‘return’ and that the Great Game will once again commence. Monitoring the ‘tremors in the web’ merely results in his being overwhelmed by an avalanche of trivial and unrelated cases. His shock at discovering that the trail of broken Thatchers is NOT about him and Moriarty is so great that he verbalizes it, thus giving Ajay enough information to track Mary down even without the data stick. And the fact that he obviously expects to be killed by Moriarty gives him the false sense of security that leads him to taunt Vivian even though she’s armed and he’s not and the last time he assumed a woman who’d pulled a gun on him wouldn’t shoot him that didn’t work out too well. He believes so strongly that Moriarty will be his killer that he can’t believe anyone else could possibly kill him. And this is why he winds up asking Mrs. Hudson to whisper “Norbury” in his ear.

TST also suggests, I think, that Sherlock believes that he is fated to drown; and one can’t blame him based on past history. There’s the famous pool scene in “The Great Game,” which is reprised in the pool fight scene in TST; and of course there’s the Reichenbach Falls themselves, realized in all their gushing glory in TAB. We know the sea will play some role in s4 given all the beach-related setlock; we also know he has a dream involving Redbeard and the beach; we also know about his dream of becoming a pirate, and pirates can die in a lot of ways but one way or another most of them are ending up in Davy Jones’s locker. His choice of the aquarium as the meeting point with Vivian is, perhaps, the expression of a death wish; the opening voiceover about Samara is played out over images of the aquarium and the bones that lie on the ocean floor, and the water-reflection shows up whenever he imagines his next confrontation with Moriarty. But of course the shark is Magnussen’s spirit animal, and as such a sign that this is really Mary’s story. Because he so badly wants to get back inside the story of Sherlock and Moriarty–even if it means his death–Sherlock fails to read that sign. Ostalgie causes him to misread a lot of things in TST.

While I’m at it, let me finish up with the most random crazycakes part of this episode, which is the mystery of Charlie’s death. Obviously, Charlie dressed up as his own car seat in order to surprise his dad and…WHO DOES THAT? WHO? WTF sense does that make? Well, all I can make of it is that Charlie’s ill-fated return from his gap year is a batshit-crazy tragicomic recapitulation of Sherlock’s Return in TEH: an elaborately prepared but really astonishingly ill-conceived surprise reunion breaks the heart of the man to whom it was supposed to bring joy. It is a sign, perhaps, that S4 will involve a lot of reliving things that happened in S1-S3, only inverted and inside-out and wrong.





End file.
